Political Psychology

11 Group Psychology
Is the State of Nature
C. FRED ALFORDUniversity of Maryland

Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they
do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

—Karl Marx (1852/1978),The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The contribution of political psychology is immediately evident if we conceive of the past that Marx was talking about not in terms of objective history, but rather as a psychological past, going back to infancy, comprised of
layers of experience that Freud compared to an archeological dig. Political
psychology studies the influence of this psychological past on the present.
In particular, political psychology studies how groups of people come to
share a psychological past that they draw on to make a collective world. This
world is no less real because we make it out of our hopes, dreams, fears, and
desires. However, unless we understand where this world comes from—
deep inside the minds of men and women who live in it—we will never be
in a position to awaken from the nightmare that is (all too often) human
history.

I came to political psychology from the study of the Frankfurt School of
Critical Theory, particularly the work of Jürgen Habermas and Herbert
Marcuse. The Frankfurt School emerged in the years before and after World

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